Rants and Screeds

Your website is atrocious. It just keeps hanging up on things, timing out, and making me try to find another way to get to the place I’m going. I’d e-mail Customer Service, but the form to e-mail them is ONE OF THOSE PLACES, you ass-hats.

I have to dig and dig to find out how much I owe you. Oh, I can see my scheduled payment in 500 different places, but to know how much I’m actually indebted, I have to be f-in’ Sherlock Holmes.

…

Oh, now that my e-mail to Customer Services timed out and didn’t send for the third time, I was forced to re-login. This time it brought up a page I’d never seen before, with instructions on how to pay off my loan and the amounts for that. As if the knavish demons who run the website heard my complaints and just wanted to prove me wrong.

How do you even exist as a business? You’ve got about 600 complaints to the BBB.

Fascists. [No, I don’t know that that applies, but it seems like something derogatory to call someone with power over you.]

I do not like the Diane Rehm Show. I don’t think I’m the only one.Today, she let a guest get away with saying that Libya and other Middle-Eastern “cultures” are “infantile.” He was not trying to be derogatory but was saying that, due to government restriction and such, their cultures are not as advanced as the West and that’s why there’s so much violence in the region; that’s just sorta “the way they respond” to things like videos. Like, because they experience so much censorship, that’s the only way they know to react to what Americans would call (albeit disgusting) “free speech.”

I didn’t catch his name, and I don’t think he was being purposely malicious, but this kind of cultural imperialism is bad enough to think, worse to say aloud on public radio, and simply CRIMINAL to allow to pass by without comment. Over and over, I get the feeling that Diane Rehm doesn’t LISTEN to her guests.

The Middle East is the CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION, allegedly. They were bathing and writing and creating art long before Europe, in my (admittedly, pedestrian) understanding of history, and definitely long before American culture was even a zygote.

To call their culture infantile and imply that tantrums are the only thing they know is terribly ignorant at best and cruelly divisive/racist/bigoted at worst. Now, to say that many of their GOVERNMENTS are young and may not yet have a handle on how best to police their citizenry may be fair… and maybe that’s what he meant. But that’s not what he said. He said CULTURE.

And even after her guests had made it pretty clear that the majority of evidence shows that the attack on the embassy was premeditated and likely linked to Al-Qaeda and the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, they still kept talking as if the film were the catalyst! That it was carried out by protestors, despite the fact that two separate witnesses said there was not “so much as an ANT” in the courtyard prior to being stormed by hundreds of people.

That attack was performed by crazy zealots. Not just “Muslims.” Just like the MANY recent shootings in America were performed by crazy people, not just Americans, or Christians, or patriots. Crazy, murderous, sickos who happen to be Muslim shouldn’t be identified solely as “Muslims.” They should be identified as crazy, murderous, sickos.

The violence is terrible. It’s disturbing and disgusting and disappointing and disheartening. But it’s not unique to Muslims or Arabs or Libyans. We wouldn’t have six Sikhs dead in America if it were just a result of Middle Eastern “infantile” culture.

Obviously, I don’t support the violence. It’s horrific. But I also don’t support violent language that perpetuates the idea that Muslims are killers and somehow Christians are turning the other cheek here. No one should be on a high horse. We should all be standing with our feet firmly planted on the ground, where we can look our neighbors in the eyes as fellow humans.

*steps off the soapbox*

I couldn’t get through on the phone, but I can’t stop being bothered by it ’til I share it.

The problem with my being on electronic devices all day every day… is that I start to believe everything is my phone.I have thought (only for a second, but still) that I should CALL each of the following items when I couldn’t immediately find them:
Pixie’s eye drops
a pen
my car keys
my phone CHARGER
sunglasses
the remote control

Okay, what the hell is with this facebook dailypic app? It’s total B.S.! I just want to see a funny picture that my friends post, but instead of opening in a nice little window in front of everything else, the damn thing takes me to an entirely new page, losing my place on the news feed, with ads everywhere. Screw you, App of Obnoxiousness +12! #FirstWorldProblems

Dear iPhone auto/spellingcorrect:
Why in hell would I write an “-ing” word with an apostrophe AFTER THE “G”?!I am CLEARLY trying to abbreviate the word to a more colloquial form: “How’s it goin’?” for example. “How’s it going’?” makes NO SENSE.

Otherwise, I have relatively few complaints, and I appreciate your custom shortcuts. Also, that I can write “sch” and have “SchmoopieDoodleLovieUmpkinsBear” come up.

Dear iPhone Camera:
Here’s the thing. Apple created a shortcut to you in the lock screen so that you’d be easier to access. I imagine that the thinking was, “Hey, folks want to be able to get pics quickly… capture the moment! Seize the day! We should make it easier to get to the camera!”So… when I use you, camera shortcut, … see, when I use you, and you don’t make the little “ker-CLICK” noise… and the picture doesn’t appear… and I frantically push the “take the adorable picture of my pit bull with her nose under her blanky before she moves” button over and OVER to no avail… and then you take five-hundred pics in a row of my couch and my lamp and my wild, frustrated flailings and in the meantime my dog has moved and is still cute but not doing THE cute thing of which I wanted a memento… when you do that, I want to smash you to tiny bits. Cut it out.

Dear facebook,
I don’t even know you anymore.
By which I mean, you make me feel old.
Or rather, you WOULD make me feel old if it weren’t for the fact that I know people in their 70’s who know how to use you and I do not.
Also, I imagine that, by now, this whole “open letter to inanimate objects and/or software” thing is passe. But… I still like the conceit.